Significant Gay Movies Since 2000

Note: In making this list of gay movies, I considered what was important to me, rather than what was important to the culture at large, not least because there are inevitably estadounidense biases, and often European ones as well, built-in to lists like these.

As a corrective to that, and in an effort at honesty, I’ve made this list personal. Also, for obvious reasons, this is a work in progress, until 2020 anyway, not least of which is my ongoing struggle to define what constitutes a gay film.

I have at least a sentence or two to write about all these films, but if I wait until I write them, this post will publish in the middle of the year. Please make suggestions for further viewing in the comments, or let me know if I’ve forgotten or overlooked something. I’d also love to hear what anyone thinks of any particular film. This is more a personal selection than it is an attempt to assess historical relevance.

While I’m still working on my response to Velociraptor (and my analysis of The Leftovers and handful of other incomplete posts), and in lieu of a best-of-2015 (which I’m not qualified to make at this point, although I’ve started the work here.) I thought I’d compile a list of my most important gay-themed movies released since 2000, or the last 15 years. Looking over my GTM list on Letterboxd, I realized, however, that the bulk of the films that resonate strongly in my mind were, in fact, released before 2000.

It’s not that there have been no good gay-themed movies released since 2000, it’s that greatness for me is a function of time and an accumulation of experiences, not just of seeing films, but of thinking, writing, and talking about them.

I’ve lived with those older films for much longer.

That’s is one reason why I don’t put much stock in ranked year-end lists, and especially not in Oscar nominations, which are primarily about career politics in Hollywood.

(And I don’t give a fuck.)

How can we know those films are great if we’ve only seen them once, or even twice, and if their memories are less than a year-old in our minds? Maybe others can figure things out that fast, but I can’t.

Still, making lists is a contribution to understanding what’s important to us, and the beginning of contextualizing and evaluating them, and so I think it’s worth doing.

The first block of films have had the most lasting impact on me, and the rest are listed in no particular order. I didn’t bother to set a numerical limit. I just chose until I was done, and I’m happy to entertain any addition to the canon. I’m ignorant of, just to name one area, of any experimental film work being done by or for gay men, so would love to fill in the blanks.

I didn’t have to think hard before putting Wang’s rigorous, disciplined but also emotional masterpiece at the top of the list. This film’s power doesn’t come primarily from its topicality — not marriage equality per se, bur rather its absence — but in the attention paid to the ordinary details in the daily life of a gay man (estadounidense Southern, and of Asian descent) and the white son of his dead lover, and to the way political realities play out through those details, within families, between friends and lovers, between individuals and institutions.

There’s no clearer, recent heir to Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, although the odd and oblique framing tactics of Wang’s static shots are quite a bit different from Ackerman’s often planimetric ones, and Wang’s film manages a happy ending, of sorts, if a provisional one, a point that most seem to miss. It’s a freeze-frame for a reason.

So it’s baffling why In the Family was rejected by more than 15 different film festivals. Or maybe not so baffling if you understand something fundamental about the taste, vision and sense of film history of our current cultural gatekeepers, and not just gay ones, who, while having put Ackerman’s film in the canon, never seem to have quite grasped its importance and implications.

In a cultural situation in which a modestly talented, juvenile filmmaker like Xavier Dolan (he’s a better actor than director) shares the spotlight with Jean Luc Godard, I supposed we shouldn’t be surprised that few people are allowed the opportunity to see In the Family.

For some of the same reasons I admire In the Family, I also love this minimalist and materialist study of an online seduction that moves into meatspace for more reasons than just to show a hot threeway, although that’s a significant achievement as well. The film focuses on the mundane social minutiae and lived-life details of three gay men in Córdoba, Argentina — an older couple and a young student — and executes that study via the seduction’s sexual dynamics as mediated through contemporary technological and physical-world apparatus, rituals and norms —things like webcams, elevators, dinner parties, and where to go on holiday.

I didn’t make clear in my rather academic analysis of the film that this attentive process is an act of valuation of particular Latin American gay-male social and sexual activities — a weighted consideration — and therefore not tangential to issues of representation, and implicitly political. I’d say it’s also at least as important and significant as, just to name, off the top of my head, scenes from the decidedly non-realist heterosexist canon, 1) the conversation between Travis and Jane in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas; or 2) the relationship between Paul and Jeanne in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. In the former, the obvious metaphorical device and psychobabble of Sam Shepard’s script left me bemused, skeptical and a bit bored. The scenario of the latter would have made more sense in a gay context. Good luck trying to convince, or even challenge, straight male cinephiles and critics of the implications of any of that. But this film is only as important if you judge gay life and sexuality to be as significant, as human, as straight life. But how many do.

For me, El Tercero stakes claim, not just to the normativity of gay-male sexual desire, but the ordinariness and necessity of objectification, as well as of male sexual vulgarity and experimentation, of cross-generational contact, of the importance of familial and national cultural contexts in negotiating domestic stability, of the range of strategies and tactics that gay men employ to find happiness. As such, underneath its quotidian calm (except for the sex scene!), it’s revolutionary.

If I were to judge by blog comments, the gay male movie-going public seems tired of movies about male prostitutes, despite the fact if there’s any group that has more or less normalized sex work, it’s gay men. That normalization is one of our great and ancient contributions to human liberation, not something to marginalize, dismiss or condescend to from the marriage-equality heights. I realize that’s a minority opinion and an occasion for establishment fags to cast aspersions; or for hypocritical, homophobic law enforcement institutions to cast a very wide net.

So, it’s not surprising that filmmakers continue making movies about hustlers. Of the group of films addressing the subject, I can only recommend a few, and none of them have focused on the Czech Republic, where I have my most direct experience and credible judgment. Bodies Without Soul and Mandragora? Rather useless, rent-boy kitsch.

One I can recommend, from another hemisphere, is Edgardo Cozarinsky’s Night Watch, not least because the narrative follows a taxi boy, the Argentine compound noun meaning male escort, prostitute or street hustler, rather than an outside observer or a john. Victor might not be flush or the best-dressed, but he’s no victim or martyr. (The English phrase is used, perhaps because the Spanish equivalent would be puto, and that’s no good) Although I have limited experience in that geo-specific milieu (but do remember vividly a masterful seeing-to by a cute, stoic, double-coming, Paraguayo jock named Emmanuel) but can vouch for the authenticity of the setting, starting out on the corner of Santa Fe and Pueyrredón, at what used to be the center of gay-male sex procurement in Buenos Aires. On a weekend night in 2010, there could be more than 50 young guys cruising for clients in the 4-block area near that corner, and even more inside the hustler/stripper/drag bar, km Zero. Like most things fun and decadent in the real world, that’s mostly gone now. So take a sort of magical realist tour of the streets of Buenos Aires with a taxi boy on the evening of All Saints Day, and into the dawn of All Souls Day, and prepare for your mind to be blown.

Here’s another beautiful film, with perfect shot after perfect shot, that the cinephile intelligentsia as well as the Queerty/Backlot amateurs of the world have somehow avoided talking much about or listing. It can’t be because it’s in Spanish and from Argentina, because Lucrecia Martel (La Ciénaga, La mujer sin cabeza) and Lisandro Alonso (Jauja, which I haven’t seen yet; Los muertos and La libertad, which I have) have both received quite a bit of attention from the usual suspects. If I have any rivals in my admiration for Martel, I have yet to read them. I’m a bit cool to Alonso’s conceptions, however, as the ones I’ve seen seem more like the rubber-stamping of certain world art-film expectations than as unique contributions to contemplative cinema; and you can skip Fantasma completely, as it’s all concept. All of them seem (except for Jauja) rather thin to me, and the distanced anthropological eye of some parts of Los muertos and La libertad was more than a little off-putting.

So why the ignorance or misunderstanding of La León? Likely it has something to do with the politics of distribution which I have no knowledge of in this case, and of course, great films fall through the cracks all the time. Yet I suspect it’s just old-fashioned heterosexist bias on the part of many straight critics, and cultural glibness and superficiality on the part of gay ones. That IMDb commenter in the link is not the first gay male viewer who has professed to not understand what was going on in the film. Here in this post, I at least began to lay out what I thought was going on. But I’m baffled by anyone’s confusion of what seems to me a straightforward narrative. It’s not like we’re challenged by long shot-durations, as in both El Tercero and In the Family, or via odd, oblique camera angles, as in the latter. Apparently, though, shooting in black and white is offensive or confusing to some yahoos, er, people. Maybe if lead character Alvaro had been prettier or not poor, it would have struck a chord with American gays. Maybe if the film included a serial killer. That always seems to help. I don’t know, maybe it’s just too sad. For me, La león, for its beautiful glimpse into an out-of-time Argentine riverine culture alone, belongs on the short list of great Latin American films of the last decade, and not just of GTMs.

I’m not sure Michael Burke’s odd and slightly off-kilter, anti-sentimental depiction of young, failed masculinity qualifies for most as a “gay movie,” but it sure got me thinking about Eve Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet.

If Gus Van Sant had been born in Argentina, he might have made something like Glue, sometime between Mala Noche and My Own Private Idaho. Cinematographer Natasha Braier, who also shot The Rover, I just discovered, long after mentioning liking the photography of that movie from 2014, seems to improv right along with the young actors, whose sexual and social daring is reflected perfectly in the film’s luminous, metamorphosing style and form.

I might get some shit for not listing any of Marco Berger’s feature-length films, all of which I enjoyed to some degree (Hawaii deserves another watch) but none of which encapsulate so forcefully and fearlessly all of Berger’s sexual and visual obsessions than this short — the most important obsession being, the male bulge, which is presented here almost like a character of its own. Javier De Pietro, scruffy and grown up a bit since he played Berger’s horny, man-chasing, high-school nymph in Ausente (2011), lusts after his friend’s cousin, but is too scared to make a move, despite el primo offering himself and his basket up repeatedly in no uncertain terms. Hilarious, sexy, frustrating in the blue-balls sense, and kinda sad all the way through, the short’s final, cut-short shot is a brilliant, funny snap of a character afraid to take chances, even though what he wants has been right in front of his cute little face.

This surprising and subtle short depicts the believably-scripted and nuanced love affair between a pair of cons in an Australian prison — one’s a lifer and one’s a young first-timer in for a petty crime. It’s funny, sweet but not cloying, and there’s barely any violence, which might help explain why it sank without a trace for so long. You can watch it on Vimeo, and yes it’s directed by thatRachel Ward.

Perhaps because Araki worked off someone else’s material (Scott Heim’s eponymous novel) and therefore had at least a skeleton to hang his visual ideas and conceits on and around, putting his own adolescent ones on the backburner, this is the only Araki film after his funny, low-fi proto-slacker film, The Long Weekend (O’Despair), that I can get behind with any enthusiasm. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has never been better.